| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 9 |
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Care is one of the conditions of human life. The birds have no care. The lambs that feed in the meadows have no care. The savage who lives in nature’s wilderness has but little anxiety. Their wants are few, and their lives lack that sensitiveness which feels trials. But as life grows in the things that ennoble it, and make it worthy, care increases. The love, which the religion of Christ teaches, makes our hearts more and more sensitive, or that instead of taking us out of the world’s trying experiences it makes us feel its hardships and burdens all the more. Life’s relationships all bring with them burden and anxiety. The peace, which Christ promises, is not made by emptying a little spot of all the darkness, suffering, and cost of its conditions and setting us down into it.
Nor, is this peace produced by so changing our nature that we shall not feel the things that cause pain and disturbance. To do this, our hearts would have to be robbed of the very qualities in them, which are noblest and divinest. Only think what it would, means to you to have taken out of your life the possibility of suffering from the trials, the losses, the injustices and wrongs, the sorrows of life. To be made so that you would not feel these things would be to lose out of your heart, the power to love and to sympathize.
Our purest joys, and our deepest suffering lie very close together. To have the capacity to love and be happy is to have also the capacity to love and to be happy is to have also the capacity to suffer. Religion makes our hearts gentler, more thoughtful, more sympathetic, and prepares us to be pained more, not less, by the frictions, the trials, and the frets of life. The Christian suffers no less in sorrow, trial, and care, because they are Christian; they probably suffer more. It is no easier, in human sense, for a friend of Christ to meet disappointments, adversities, bereavements, and loses, and to endure the frictions and annoyances of life, than it is for the worldly person; it may be harder. It is not by dulling the sensibilities that Christ gives peace. It is not by dulling the sensibilities that Christ gives peace. It is a peace in the heart which he gives, a peace which one may have within, while without storms are raging; a calm in the soul in the midst of external agitation’s and tumults; a quiet restfulness which holds the life in a serene composure even while all things seem to be disastrous; a spirit unperturbed, unfretted, unruffled, in the midst of life’s multitudinous cares.
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